By Francis X. Maier
For Christians, this week is the heart of our liturgical year. Holy Week is a time of gratitude and celebration; a time of joy that rises above the frictions of everyday life and reminds us of our eternal destiny. But, of course, a fallen world rarely cooperates. Wise men, from Heraclitus to Hobbes, have asserted that «war is the mother of all things» and the natural state of man. So it has seemed throughout history. So it seems now, in our own time.
This Holy Week marks the 81st anniversary of the death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A talented Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer co-founded the Confessing Church movement in Germany in the 1930s to oppose the Nazification of his country’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Third Reich hanged him in the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. The charge was treason, based on his rescue of Jews and the dissemination of information about resistance to the regime, but ultimately—and decisively—in his ties to the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was a skilled writer and teacher. And among his most famous remarks is this: «Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.» The words are memorable. It is debated whether he actually said them. But it doesn’t matter. They are true in their meaning, and Bonhoeffer’s life and death embodied them.
I recalled those words over the Holy Week weekend, reading a editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The Journal is no admirer of the current occupant of the White House. Its pages are full of criticism of the man in charge, his style, and his policies. But in «North Korea’s Lesson for Iran,» it outlines 40 years of failed diplomacy with a committed and intensely dangerous enemy, and warns about «what happens when the U.S. puts avoidance of conflict above all else.»
Starting in the early 1980s, the Pyongyang regime systematically lied, outmaneuvered, and threatened the international community while pursuing its nuclear weapons program. The United States responded with indecision. As a result, North Korea is now believed to possess:
about 50 warheads, and conducts tests with intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that someday could reach the U.S. mainland. The latest missile test took place last Sunday. The lesson is that U.S. presidents waited too long to stop North Korea. It was always said that the risks of war were too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust. North Korea is now a nuclear power, which means it could escalate to devastating effects in any conflict.
There’s more:
This is, more or less, the path that at least four presidents took with Iran. Talks, agreements, and economic relief were constant features, with sanctions used as a negotiating tactic but without a credible threat of force. Like Pyongyang, Tehran accepted a deal that did not require it to be honest about its past nuclear activities and left its nuclear infrastructure intact for the future. The Iranian regime never stopped seeking the bomb.
And finally: «We don’t know how the current conflict with Iran will end, but we do know that Iran’s radical regime will not have a nuclear program when it does.»
One can have hope. My own views on the Iran conflict, at least as presented to date, are detailed elsewhere. So far, criticisms of the U.S.-Israeli effort have been a mix of serious and urgent moral concern; common-sense anxiety about the outcome; and chronic abhorrence toward the man behind the desk in the current Oval Office—with a dash of anti-Jewish hatred toward Israel thrown in from both the left and the right—.
Mentioning Dietrich Bonhoeffer in relation to any of this, of course, carries the risk of a very unpleasant response. We remember Bonhoeffer as a martyr, not as the conspirator in a planned tyrannicide. The differences between his time and ours, between Germany in April 1945 and our own world in April 2026, are too many to count. And an abyss of moral character and heroism separates a man like Bonhoeffer from every recent U.S. president, including the one we have now. The point here is simply this: history never repeats itself. But the patterns of human behavior that make history repeat all the time.
When Iran commits to the destruction of Israel and the punishment of the United States as the «Great Satan» of humanity, and persists in it, most Jews know they must believe it. They remember what such words meant in the wake of the events of the last century. For Israel, Tehran is not just an enemy, but a continuous existential threat.
Americans are different. We take our success and advantages for granted. We haven’t had war on our soil for 160 years. We have the luxury of comfort and distractions; of imagining that what happens in the Middle East is far away, someone else’s problem, and can’t really hurt us here at home—this, despite 47 years of relentless violence sponsored by Tehran, tens of thousands of victims worldwide, dishonest negotiations and systematic lies toward a goal of nuclear weapons and the magnified evil that would entail—. The lies and violence won’t stop. They can’t, because they are etched in the DNA of a regime driven by religiously sick hatred.
In the United States, we have the freedom to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ with joy and in public this Holy Week. The laws, the faith, and the material power we still possess make it possible. We are far from being a pure or innocent country; all nations are mixed clay. But some nations choose a much worse course than others; one that threatens far more than their immediate neighbors.
Justice and prudence must guide our actions. As much as possible, and as the Journal also emphasizes, the burden of suffering must be borne by Iran’s murderous regime, not its people. But that is no excuse for paralysis when all other avenues to prevent a grave and imminent danger fail. Doing nothing in the face of such evil is itself evil. And not acting is acting.
About the author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of «True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.»